1. Northern Gothic: this 1647 view, by Wenceslaus Hollar, from Southwark to the Tower of London, reveals an unplanned jumble of half-timbered houses wrapped round the Gothic church of St Olave’s.

2. Southern classical: Christopher Wren’s post-fire plan for the City of London, 1666, looking east, St Paul’s in the foreground. Wren’s even grid, boulevards and symmetrical hubs were killed off by the English dislike of the grand project.

3. Barns, the treasuries of medieval England. Manor Farm Barn, Harmondsworth – called ‘The Cathedral of Middlesex’ by John Betjeman – was built in 1426 to store the grain for Winchester College. The barn was constructed on cathedral lines, with aisles either side of a nave, supported by a dense web of pointed Gothic arches.

4. Liverpool Street Station, built in 1875 to resemble a Gothic cathedral. The station was designed on the medieval Latin Cross church plan.

5. Grandness disguising small-scale, domesticated usefulness. In 1824 John Nash built the first semi-detached houses in England, in Park Village East, Regent’s Park. Two houses lie behind the unified skin of a single, grander, classical villa. The pub, right, was built on a traditional corner site.

6. Cricket was first played on the springy chalk downs of southern England. Here, Sussex take on Kent at Brighton in the 1840s. Among the Sussex players is John Wisden, founder of the eponymous cricketers’ almanac. In the background, a familiar combination: a chaotic collection of classical terraces jostle around the Gothic church.

7. Follies: affection for the past mingled with a romantic attachment to decay. Virginia Water, Windsor Great Park, and the second-century AD columns from Leptis Magna, Libya.

8. When the Savoy opened in 1889, it was the first British hotel to have hot and cold running water, electric light throughout and ‘ascending rooms’, or lifts. Only some rooms were en suite – there were sixty-seven bathrooms for 250 bedrooms.

9. The Shambles, York, voted Britain’s most picturesque street. The fourteenth-century street of old butchers’ shops – with timber-framed, jettied upper storeys leaning at drunken angles – evokes a natural, organic, literally shambolic beauty.

10. Cornwall, England’s granite county. Here, in 1936, stonemasons at Carnsew Quarry, Penryn, cut Cornish granite into blocks for the piers and buttresses of the new Chelsea Bridge.

11. Pleasure in walking, in unspecialized clothes. Man, sheepdog, sheep and drystone walls, Yorkshire, 1965. More than half the 70,000 miles of drystone walls in England are in Yorkshire, Cornwall, Derbyshire and Cumbria.

12. Dressed for unpredictable weather – second layer needed on Scarborough’s South Bay Beach, 9 August 1952. Above looms the Grand Hotel, a High Victorian colossus built in 1867 by Cuthbert Brodrick in Mixed Renaissance style. When opened, the Grand, the greatest hotel in Europe, was the first hotel of that name in the world.

13. Motorways get off the ground – just. In September 1959, Jayne Mansfield opened the Chiswick flyover in west London. ‘It’s a sweet little flyover,’ she said. Little was the operative word – it was a quarter of a mile long.

14. The stones beneath Caversham Road (the author’s street), north London, resurfaced in 2011. The Dartmoor granite kerbstones have been ‘chitted’, or roughened, to prevent slipping. The newly exposed Victorian street is made of sarsen silcrete setts – small cubes of sandstone from Cranborne Chase, Dorset.

15. The garden square, a triumph of English urban planning: Queen’s Square, Bath, built by John Wood the Elder in 1736. To the right, the north side consists of seven houses grouped together to form a single Palladian facade.

16. Why England doesn’t look like England: the Bull Ring, Birmingham, bombed in 1940 and twice rebuilt, in 1967 and 2003. Solid, barely adorned chunks of glass and steel swamp the tapering, prickly, Gothic outline of medieval St Martin in the Bull Ring.

1. Wiltshire, from John Speed’s 1611 map of England. The county has already been largely deforested, and the modern constellation of villages, towns, cities and historical sites, like Stonehenge, is in place.

2. Mr and Mrs Andrews by Thomas Gainsborough, 1750. Robert and Frances Andrews lived at Ballingdon House, Sudbury, Suffolk. Half portrait, half landscape, the picture shows, to the right, the long, straight rows of wheat sown with Jethro Tull’s drill, invented in 1701.

3. Ornamental chimneys and a fetish for brick: at Tudor Hampton Court, the corkscrewing, diamond-patterned chimneys are topped with mini-crenellations.

4. Nikolaus Pevsner thought the greenness of Durham distinguished it from Continental cathedral-castle cities like Avignon and Prague.

5. Pleasure in al fresco dining, and indifference to weather: The Garden of Hampton House, with Mr and Mrs David Garrick Taking Tea by Johan Zoffany, 1762. The earliest painting of an English picnic shows the actor at his villa by the Thames.

6. The creation of the industrial landscape: the Cornish horizon was enhanced, not disfigured, by chimneys and engine houses. A Gentleman and a Miner with a Specimen of Copper Ore by John Opie (1761–1807).

7. A classically English garden: fence, border, lawn, shed and higgledy-piggledy rear extensions. Stockwell Garden, South London, Spring 2004 by Virginia Powell.

8. Canning Town by Henry Lamb, 1947. Pubs – like this one near the east London docks – were largely the preserve of men until the 1960s.

9. St Mary’s, Cavendish, Suffolk, built on the back of the sheep-powered, East Anglian economy. The strawberry ice-cream pink of Church Cottages was originally made by adding a dash of oxblood to white limewash.

10. The deep brown, honey and cheddar-yellow colours of Arlington Row, Bibury, Gloucestershire, produced by oolitic limestone. The lichened, crooked roofs of the weavers’ cottages are also made from limestone.

11. Classic sixteenth-century, English vernacular in Puckeridge, Hertfordshire: pointed gables, dormer windows, mammoth chimneys, tiled roofs, herringbone brick and overhanging, jettied first floors.

12. Thanks to the south-westerly wind, and the docks, east London was poorer than the west. Whitechapel in ‘The Descriptive Map of London Poverty’ by Charles Booth, 1889 – areas marked in black were inhabited by the ‘lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal’. Red areas were ‘Middle-class. Well to do’.

13. Train Landscape by Eric Ravilious, 1939. Chalk downs produce gentle hollows and broad, spreading humps. The Westbury Horse, Wiltshire, was carved out of the escarpment on Salisbury Plain to reveal the white chalk beneath.

14. Straight as a die: Roman Ermine Street, now the A15 between Scunthorpe and Lincoln, painted by David Gentleman in 1964. Planned, post-enclosure landscape lies on either side, with straight hedges and symmetrical fields.

15. ‘Scudamore’, a sixteenth-century farmhouse in Letchworth, Hertfordshire, was used by advertisers a century ago, to draw people to the first new garden city. The half-timbered building reflected the influences on the garden cities – Arts and Crafts, rural, English.

16. Playful seaside architecture: a 1930 London and North Eastern Railway poster. All the peculiar elements of the English seaside are there – the bandstand, beach huts, pavilion and floral clock.

17. A love of jokey historical references: Sir John Soane’s 1815 monument to his wife, St Pancras Old Church, north London.

18. And its descendant, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s K6 phone box, designed in 1935 – this one is in Market Harborough, Leicestershire.

19. Chalk, the most English of stones. The connection between quintessential England and the chalk downland of the South Downs is made explicit in this 1942 wartime poster.

20. In Withnail and I, a drunk Withnail drives his Jaguar Mark 2 down the M6 from Cumbria to London in 1969. In fact, he’s driving around the M25, near Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, shortly before the motorway opened in 1986. Motorway signage hasn’t changed since 1958.

21. The Road Across the Wolds by David Hockney, 1997. The Yorkshire Wolds – post-enclosure, planned countryside, dotted with isolated farms and criss-crossed with straight hedges, tree-lines and woodland edges.